Eleutheran Adventurers

The Eleutheran Adventurers were a group of English Puritans and religious Independents who left Bermuda to settle on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas in the late 1640s. The small group of Puritan settlers, led by a man named William Sayle, had been expelled from Bermuda for their failure to swear allegiance to the Crown, and were searching for a place in which they could freely practice their faith. This group represented the first concerted European effort to colonize the Bahamas.

The mid-17th century was a period of constant religious and political turmoil in England and in Europe which culminated in the English Civil War, a series of conflicts, the first of which was fought between King Charles I and Parliament, and led ultimately to the Protectorship of the Puritan general, Oliver Cromwell. This conflict spread to Bermuda where a period of civil strife resulted in a victory for the supporters of the Loyalist party in the English Civil War. The struggle eventually led to the expulsion of the colony's Puritans and independents to the Bahamas, which the English had laid claim to in 1629, but had not permanently settled. Earlier in 1644, the Bermudian Independent Puritans had sent an expedition to explore these new islands, but one vessel was lost and the other failed to find a suitable island.

Nevertheless, sometime between spring 1646 and autumn 1648, Sayle took some seventy people to settle in the Bahamas. They made landfall on the island called Cigateo, which they named Eleutheria, from the Greek word for "freedom", although the name later became Eleuthera. The island's original inhabitants, the Lucayans, had been decimated through the slaving activities of the Spanish and the numerous European diseases, especially smallpox, that followed.

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